This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube episode titled "The Impact of Reddit Answers" (uploaded February 20, 2025). It’s a podcast-style conversation between two hosts who discuss Reddit’s new LLM-powered Answers/search, the value of Reddit communities for authentic user feedback, company spending priorities (including DEI and server costs), hiring and diversity philosophies, severance/layoff practices (referencing Netflix’s approach), and referral help for departed employees. The hosts also promote NP Digital and call listeners to visit marketingschool.io/agency. Several people (Neil and Eric) are mentioned in third person, but the speakers themselves are unnamed in the excerpt.
Chapters
All right, let's talk about the impact of Reddit Answers. I'm curious on this one. You have a tweet on this.
Reddit just launched their own LLM search engine. You saw that, right?
Yeah.
I haven't quite used it yet. I think we can talk about our reaction to this, but it aggregates and summarizes relevant responses across threads. And so I think this is interesting because for me, even yet, actually this morning I was at the gym and I got bored and I, this was in between sets. I was looking at the jiu-jitsu section, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu section. And the communities are very vibrant in there. They're very engaging and they're sharing like crazy stuff like injuries they're having and all these things, right? So you're getting raw responses from people that you can mostly trust, right? I think Reddit is one of the best places to go to if you want real feedback from users that actually participate in this stuff.
Yeah, I think Reddit is a great place to go for not just community feedback, but building relationships with your crazy diehard customers. And when I say crazy, I mean that in a good way. People who just love a brand or hate them, and you can turn the haters into lovers. But I think Reddit is a really underutilized social network that not enough marketers leverage.
Yep.
And the reason they don't is they're worried that, oh, what if people say negative things? Well, people can say negative things anywhere on the web. They can leave negative reviews. They can create hateful websites that just, you know, talk crap about you. And funny enough, a lot of them just keep popping up and then they ask you for money to take it down.
Yeah, I mean, look, this is— I think we're gonna see a lot. Like, Grok does this with Twitter, okay? I think a lot— if you have a lot of data, Wikipedia will probably do this as well eventually.
Yes. Yeah, I think they gotta reallocate how they spend their money because there's a lot of inefficiencies. I could be wrong. The last article I read—
well, we saw how much they spent on DEI. Um, yeah, it's a large chunk of the server cost was like $3 million a year or something like that, and then it was like $50-60 million a year towards other stuff.
Yeah, and if you want to spend $50, $60 million or have DEI programs, that's fine. But you should make sure you're spending the majority of your money to improve the business and improve the experience for your customers before anything else. At the end, dude, the market's tough. If you're not optimizing for what's best for your customer, you're going to end up losing to someone who does.
So what I told my people team is like, not that diversity isn't important, But more so, you have to focus on the mission of the company. If you start to have 2 different missions, people get distracted. And it's really, it's already hard enough to do one company. So if you have 2 or 3 different missions, you're fighting for all these different things. It makes work really hard and makes it unfun because you have to focus on too many things at once.
The way I look at diversity, especially in marketing, is if you have people from all different types of groups, religions, countries, nationalities, skin colors, et cetera. They can bring a unique perspective when you're doing marketing campaigns, which is amazing and great. And as recruiters, you should go search out there for the best people no matter what skin color they are. But at the end of the day, you want to hire the people who are the best. Doesn't matter if their skin color's different than what you may be used to, or if they're a guy or a girl or they're gender neutral. Just hire the best person for the job. If you hire the best person for a job, your company should grow and you should see the best results.
Look, if you're hiring someone based on merit, usually what ends up happening is diversity is built in. Because the reality is in a very competitive market, especially in technology, for example, it's very competitive, right? You actually can't afford to be racist. You have to hire the best person possible and it forces you to be colorblind, right? This is assuming you are racist, which I think is like, if you are racist, like it doesn't quite make sense, right? If you're a smart person, it doesn't, it really doesn't quite make sense. You just want the smartest, you want to work with the smartest people. And you want to build the coolest things. And so you actually don't have time to be racist. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.
So I'll ask you a question. You take a guess on what I did. A few years ago, I was on an offsite meeting and it was for one of our divisions, and quite a few people were there. It was all leadership. There was this guy who was running it. He was running that whole division. He was, you know, in charge of it in essence. So every time I asked him questions, he passed it off to the person who was underneath him, who was a female, and he kept doing that. What signal, or what do you think that made me think right away when he kept doing that?
The female's more competent.
Uh-huh. What do you think I ended up doing?
You promoted her and fired him?
Yes.
Yeah.
Didn't care about race, skin color, female, male. I'm like, oh, she's more qualified. People look up to her. And I can tell that people go to her for answers and for solutions. I'm like, I don't want that guy running anything. He doesn't know the answers. I want the person who does. I don't care what skin color, you know, gender she is. She is competent. She is qualified. She should have that role.
You want to know Netflix's philosophy when it comes to hiring?
What?
Adequate performance gets a generous severance package.
I love it.
That's the line I've been repeating to everyone, to my people team. Adequate performance gets a generous severance package.
You're a startup, you don't have to do generous severance package. Netflix is publicly traded, they probably do.
So it's interesting. I told the team, they're like, no, I don't know about generous. I'm like, adequate performance gets a severance package.
There you go. But of course you should look out for people. You don't want anyone on the street.
Of course. No. And by the way, I told my team, like, nobody gets any joy in having to let someone go. It's actually our fault. for making that hire in the first place. And so we want to make sure that they're taken care of, they can do their best work somewhere else, all jokes aside, because they will do their best work somewhere else. And you don't want to make them miserable in your company.
So, and I've seen Eric lay people off and then he'll hit his friends up saying, hey, do you want this person? They're really good at X, Y, and Z if you have any openings for them.
Even if it's a firing still.
Yes.
I'll do it.
And I've done the same thing on my end as well.
Yeah. So anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to join 50+ other agency owners to grow your agency faster.
